A few days ago, a new version of Spring - Spring Framework 6 was made officially available. It is a major upgrade as it utilizes the JDK 17 features. Spring 6 also comes with support of Jakarta EE 9, which means Tomcat 10.1 will work seamlessly with Spring Framework.
The exciting news was published November 16th on Spring IO blog. It comes with new features and even more significant technology upgrades.
Spring 6 is built using JDK 17, which utilizes Java 17 features on one hand. They even timidly mentioned, that Spring 6 is early compatible with virtual threads from JDK 19. On the other hand, you must upgrade your project to JDK 17 as well, if you want to use Spring 6. The previous Spring release - 5.3 was based on JDK 15, so there are significant namespace changes between them, which breaks the backward compatibility.
Jakarta EE 9+ support is a great information for those who strongly wanted to use latest application servers like Tomcat 10.1, Jetty 11 or Undertow 2.3. Earlier, we had to stick to Java EE 8 API servers like Tomcat 9.0.
Another huge change, that many developers might be interested in, is Hibernate support. Although, Hibernate ORM 5.6 will still work, Spring 6 is compatible with Hibernate ORM 6.1.
Kotlin fanatics for sure will notice Kotlin 1.7 in the release notes.
More details about release notes can be found on What's New in Spring Framework 6.x.
